A message by five Congressmen to Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger expressed their “dismay” at his news conference statement last Wednesday, which they said “implicitly” linked further U.S. aid to Israel with continuing assistance to the “regimes” in South Vietnam and Cambodia.
The Congressmen in their message made available today to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency said, “Surely there is no comparison” between Israel “a strong, stable, democratic ally of the United States in an area of the world vital to American security” and “two tottering, corrupt, dictatorial regimes in Indo-China.”
The Congressmen said the questions at stake of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and Indo-China are not about U.S. “durability as you claim but rather about our judgement.” They said U.S. aid to Israel makes “sense–strategically, politically, historically and morally”–while U.S. policy in Indo-China “has been a disaster.” The message was signed by Representatives Elizabeth Holtzman, Bella Abzug, Herman Badillo, Edward Koch and Benjamin Rosenthal, all New York Democrats.
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